Last weekend, the 2025 NASCAR season began in earnest with the Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium.
Before everyone reading this starts jumping on me for the admittedly controversial take referenced in the title, let me be clear: I was in favour of the Clash being held at Bowman Gray Stadium before the first lap was run at the L.A. Coliseum in 2022. With the Next Gen car being debuted at the first Clash at the Coliseum, NASCAR used Bowman Gray as their test track, to see how the cars would handle.
At the time, I thought “Well, this track (located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina) is in the heart of NASCAR’s traditional fanbase, why not just run it there?” I understood NASCAR’s thinking, they wanted to introduce their product to a new audience, the always lucrative Los Angeles/ California/West Coast market.
The problem was that, after spending over $1 million (I’ve heard it was closer to $2 million) on a track they ran on for two days and started demolishing the day after, they also had to import musical acts such as Ice Cube, Cypress Hill, Wiz Khalifa and others in an attempt to get fans to show up.
The problem was…it showed. The lasting image I will always have of the Clash is a shot of a fan, chin in his hand, looking about as bored as possible. To say nothing of the dead silence throughout driver introductions and the steady line of people heading for the exits as soon as the last musical act finished their set. While I’m sure there were many fans who attended the Clash at the Coliseum as their first NASCAR experience and became long-term fans, there seemed to be a heck of a lot of attendees who saw the race as something they had to sit through in order to attend a concert.
Meanwhile, I kept thinking “they’re putting all that money into a track they’re tearing up tomorrow morning?” I also questioned the impact on NASCAR as a whole if the money being used to build the track at the Coliseum was put into a track like Bowman Gray Stadium. If you scroll down, you’ll see that my most recent article was about my love of the Tubi platform. In the run-up to the Cook Out Clash, Tubi aired some of the past NASCAR-sanctioned races including in the K&N Series and the Whelan Modified Series. The track has also hosted races in what is now the Xfinity Series, as well as the Grand American, Dash Series and Convertible Series. While the Cup series ran their last race in 1971 (back when it was the Grand National Series), the track has continued to promote racing since 1949. It could certainly be argued that every dollar spent on Bowman Gray Stadium would be worth ten times the money spent on the Coliseum, because there is a greater chance for there to be drivers who end up winning races in the Cup Series that learned their craft at Bowman Gray Stadium.
In 2025, the three-year experiment in California came to a close and NASCAR returned to its roots and brought the season-opening Clash to Bowman Gray, to a packed house of racing fans, all of whom were there to see NASCAR, not some 90s rap group. They wanted to see cars on track.
The end result was a lot of excited fans and maybe some racing that made the highlight reels, just not for the right reasons.
In the four one-hundred lap heat races, there was not a single pass for the lead. Those who qualified on the pole for their heat race led every single lap. For about 90% of those races, there wasn’t even a battle for the lead. The Last Chance Qualifier was a different animal. It seemed as if the drivers, concerned they might not make the main event, put in a little bit more effort and produced the best racing of the weekend. As for that Main Event, there were two passes for the lead. Chase Elliott led the first 90 laps or so and then got passed by Denny Hamlin and fell back to third. Hamlin led until he was passed by Elliott who led the rest of the race.
The on-track battles for position were further back in the pack. And yes, I know there’s arguments to be made that any battle for position can be exciting but let’s be realistic, a battle for 12th is nowhere near as exciting as a battle for the lead.
As for the “excitement,” that came from drivers banging into each other and spinning out. It doesn’t exactly make the drivers in the race seem like ‘the most skilled race car drivers in the world” and professionals with years of experience. It seemed more like the high-speed demolition derby that detractors of the sport so often describe it as.
Sooo… yeah, the first Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium, when you really stop and analyze it, kinda sucked. But that’s okay. It was their first time there in Cup cars since literally every person in the field was born. It can be defended by the fact that the Cup cars were running on the shortest track they’d run on with more horsepower than has probably ever been run there. At the same time, they’d only had 20 minutes of practice before the heat races started, with about a third of the number of cars on track at any given time.
It will get better. The 2026 Cook Out Clash from Bowman Gray Stadium will be that much better and the 2027 Clash will be even better than that. The fact is that NASCAR went back to their roots. It’s great to explore new markets and draw new fans, but the core fan base needs to be remembered and catered to as well.
johnmilner.ca 